First Let me give you my advice on the act of creating a text document. Every
new document has no spaces and no carriage returns. That means that the down
arrow key doesn't do anything when you first start a new document The first
thing I do when I start a new document is to hit the ENTER Key 4 or 5 times
in a row, then hit the up arrow and stop on the 2nd line from the top. As we
begin typing now we have a blank line above and a blank line below. Lets say
we have typed about 3/4 of a line of text and we see a mistake in the middle
we want to correct right now. First we use the left arrow key to get the misspelling,
make the change, and now the cursor is in the middle of the line and we're in
the middle of a thought and we don't want to have to wait before we can start
typing again. Now because of what we did in the beginning (the extra carnage
returns) we are just 2 keystrokes away from the end of the line. Down arrow
will bring the cursor to the beginning of the blank line below. Left arrow will
put the cursor at the end of the line before it. This puts us right where we
want to be to resume typing where we left off. When we highlight text we can
see the spaces. This lets us know where we can move the cursor. And moving the
cursor is what changes typing into word processing.
I have written the cut and paste tutorial several times before but for one reason
or another the data has become lost. So lets give it a go one more time.
Cut and paste is probably the most fundamental part of word processing. The
first and most important part of the cut and paste process is highlighting the
text. Now there are two basic ways to highlight text. The first and easiest
is to use the keyboard. The other way is to use the Glide Pad (or mouse) this
takes practice.
To highlight (or select) text with the keyboard we first need some text. You
can load a document you have typed before or you can type just a few sample
lines. Now we need to put the cursor at the beginning of the text we want to
highlight. Then while HOLDING DOWN the Shift key use the RIGHT ARROW KEY to
highlight the text you want to copy. (I will explain how to highlight text with
the Glide Pad later in this text.)
Now that we have text selected, we want to copy it. Hit the F7 (copy) key at
on the top row of your keyboard. Now move your cursor to a blank line in your
document and press the F8 (paste) key at the top of the keyboard.
That's it! We have just done a Cut and Paste.
Now that we have done the simplest and most basic cut and paste there is still
more we can learn right now. Hit the F8 key again. Now we have 2 new copies
of our previously selected text. Now lets move the cursor to some middle spot
in the text. We just use the arrow keys to move the cursor where we want to
be, and hit the F8 key again. This inserts the text into the middle of our document.
If you are having trouble understand anything so far, just repeat what we have
done so far. This, like anything else, takes practice. You can write a novel
with just the Cut and Past techniques I have just illustrated. The next part
is just 'nice to know' stuff.
Highlighting text with the glide pad is more physically difficult to do. It
is much easier with a mouse but the same principles apply with both.
First we move the cursor to the beginning of the text we want to highlight (somewhere
in the middle). Then we hold down the large rectangular button beneath the glide
pad (or the LEFT mouse button) then Drag the pointer to the end of the desired
text, then let go of the button.
The text is now highlighted. We can hit the F7 (copy) key to copy the text or
we can just type and we will replace the highlighted text.
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